“Well, but HE does you justice—he knows. So it shows, so it shows—!”
But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. “Ah Nanda, Nanda!” he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.
“It’s I—it’s I, therefore,” she said as if she must then so look at it with him; “it’s I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still.”
He stared at her with his barren sorrow. “A person different from him?”
“A person different from ME!”
“And what interest have I in any such person?”
“But your interest in me—you see well enough where THAT lands us.”
Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, “You say you WILL come then?” he asked. Then as—seemingly with her last thought—she kept silent: “You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me—or to BE left.”
“I understand,” she presently replied. “Never again. That,” she continued, “is why I asked you for these days.”
“Well then, since you’ve taken them—”